Shipmondo is the shipping engine behind GrejFreak's 85,000+ annual packages

With more than 85,000 packages a year, multiple carriers and a system landscape of specialized solutions, GrejFreak needs a shipping engine that can work together with the rest of the business. Today, Shipmondo manages shipment booking, label generation and communication with the carriers in the background.

GrejFreak was founded back in 2008 by childhood friends Kristian Rasmussen and Casper Pedersen. With Kristian’s background in the Danish military and Casper’s love of the outdoors, they had a shared interest in and experience of needing exactly the right gear. That was the starting point for what is today a company with just over 40 employees and more than 30,000 SKUs from over 400 different brands in a 900 m² warehouse.

What started as a small stockroom in Casper’s parents’ garage, with the aim of meeting professional soldiers’ demand for proper equipment, has grown into a mission to offer quality gear for the military, hunting and general outdoor living, with the best products on the market. Today, GrejFreak runs both a warehouse and a physical showroom in Viby J near Aarhus, in addition to its webshop, which is available in Denmark and Germany.

When growth made shipping more complex, Shipmondo came into the picture

Since 2016, GrejFreak’s growth has really taken off, earning the company six of Børsen’s Gazelle awards, among other things. And as the company has grown, so has its need to automate its work processes.

Among other things, this meant that in 2023 GrejFreak chose Shipmondo as its shipping solution. The company needed to move away from manual pick lists, start working with barcode scanning and bring multiple carriers together without isolating shipping management from its other systems.

As GrejFreak grew, shipping management also became more complex. More orders, more shipping products and more carriers quickly mean more systems and processes that need to work together, says Andreas Østergaard, Chief Digital Officer at GrejFreak.

The choice fell on Shipmondo, which could deliver exactly the solutions they needed to further optimize and scale their business.

We needed a solution that could manage picking via barcode scanning while giving us the flexibility to work with multiple carriers. It was also important to us that the solution could be integrated with our other systems so we weren't dependent on manual processes. Shipmondo was a good fit for that need, and it also gave us the opportunity to develop our setup on an ongoing basis, says Andreas Østergaard.

As Chief Digital Officer, Andreas Østergaard works with the digital side of GrejFreak: the systems and processes that support GrejFreak’s business, from e-commerce and integrations to the infrastructure around the order, warehouse and shipping flow.

Shipmondo moved from the warehouse into the engine room

GrejFreak’s digital setup today consists of several specialized systems.

Shopify powers the webshop, Selveo manages the warehouse, and Shipmondo’s role is to manage shipping in the background.

That doesn’t mean Shipmondo has become less important in GrejFreak’s setup. Its role has changed. Where Shipmondo used to be a tool that employees worked in directly, the platform now serves as the shipping engine between GrejFreak’s systems and carriers.

This also illustrates a development that many growing e-commerce companies experience. In a growing e-commerce setup, one system doesn’t have to manage every task. What matters is that the specialized systems can work together. At GrejFreak, Shipmondo has become the cog that connects shipping to the rest of the system landscape.

Here, Shipmondo has become a cog in a larger engine room at GrejFreak, taking on the complexity of shipping while Selveo takes on the complex and heavy warehouse processes.

As our warehouse operations have grown, we've implemented Selveo as a dedicated WMS. That's why Shipmondo now sits more in the background as the shipping engine in our setup. Among other things, we use Shipmondo for booking shipments via API, shipping labels and the rest of the communication with our carriers, explains Andreas Østergaard.

GrejFreak’s warehouse staff therefore now work primarily in Selveo, where they receive their tasks and manage the daily pick-and-pack flow. When an order is ready to ship, communication with Shipmondo takes place in the background through Selveo’s integration with Shipmondo, which creates the shipping labels and sends documents to the carrier.

A platform like Shipmondo is an important part of our setup because it acts as a hub for label generation, so we don't have to maintain lots of carrier integrations ourselves. That way, Shipmondo today sits more in the engine room than with the individual employee, says Andreas Østergaard.

One integration makes room for multiple carriers

For a business that sells in several markets, this also matters in practical terms. GrejFreak currently has carriers for parcels in Denmark and Germany respectively, plus one carrier for pallets. Because the agreements are gathered in Shipmondo, a change to the shipping setup doesn’t also have to mean a new integration project.

One of the advantages of Shipmondo is precisely that the carriers can be gathered behind the same integration. That means we don't have to start a whole new technical integration project every time we want to expand our shipping setup or work with a new carrier agreement. It gives us flexibility, which is important in a business where needs are constantly evolving, says Andreas Østergaard.

When the shipping engine is critical, it just has to work

With more than 85,000 packages a year, the shipping engine is a critical part of GrejFreak’s daily operations. Without labels, the warehouse can’t send orders on. That’s why stability is essential.

At the same time, help needs to be available when questions arise. Andreas Østergaard highlights Shipmondo’s support as fast and competent, but his description of day-to-day operations is really the best picture of the collaboration:

Stability is hugely important in this part of our business. If Shipmondo is down, our warehouse can't create labels. If we can't create labels, we can't ship orders. By and large, it just runs the way it should, explains Andreas Østergaard.

At GrejFreak, Shipmondo has become the shipping engine that just runs. It brings label generation and carrier communication together, while GrejFreak can develop the rest of its system landscape around it.

GrejFreak’s development is a prime illustration of how Shipmondo can serve either as the business’s complete solution for order and shipping management, or as an integrated cog in a larger system landscape. With an API and integrations with 80+ systems, companies can connect their existing setup to Shipmondo and bring multiple carriers together through Shipmondo.